Obama visit to Vietnam

• U.S. President Barack Obama has lifted a decades-old arms export embargo on Vietnam.
• Obama is the third president of USA to visited Vietnam.

Analysis on US - Vietnam Relations:

• After a period of broken diplomatic ties following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the United States and Vietnam re-established formal diplomatic relations in 1995.
• Since then, the two nations have built increasingly close strategic and economic ties, to the point that Hanoi is now one of the United States’s closest security partners in Asia.
• With a professional military and a highly strategic location, Vietnam is gradually becoming as important to U.S. security interests in the region as longtime allies and partners like Thailand and Malaysia.
• In addition, Vietnam’s economy, which has significant room for expansion, is far more attractive to new investors than Thailand, where foreign investment dropped by roughly 90 percent year-on-year in 2015. Despite being authoritarian, Vietnam is also—for now—relatively stable, compared to countries in the region that have undergone troubled attempts at democratization, like Thailand and Malaysia.
• In addition, lifting the embargo will not mean that U.S. defense manufacturers are suddenly going to win a flood of contracts in Hanoi.
• Although Vietnam is now one of the ten largest buyers of arms in the world, and mainly depended on Russia. But now with lifting of arm embargo, it will certainly boost the interest of arms lobby of USA.
• Most importantly, the lifting of the embargo, and Vietnam’s increasing willingness to be seen, regionally, as a close partner of the United States, is a sign that Hanoi is abandoning its decades-old strategy of balancing relations between Beijing and Washington.
• Hanoi is embracing closer strategic relations with U.S. Asian partners like the Philippines, Japan, Singapore, and India, while doing little to mend strained relations with Beijing.
• However, US is seeking to strike this balance with Vietnam amid Chinese efforts to strengthen claims to disputed territory in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most important waterways.
• Lifting the arms embargo will be a psychological boost for Vietnam’s leaders as they look to counter an increasingly aggressive China, but there may not be a big jump in sales.

By: Vishal